


Sword Art Alternate Ending

by orphan_account



Category: Sword Art Online (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M, Rationalist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2020-06-29 19:31:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19837048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: By Eliezer Yudkowsky, rehosted with permission





	Sword Art Alternate Ending

**Author's Note:**

> By Eliezer Yudkowsky, rehosted with permission

My eyes opened.

I was blinded by the glory of sunlight and reflected sunlight, a sharp change of illumination from the dungeon chamber where I'd just been.

When my eyes cleared, I saw floating before me the great Castle and World of Aincrad, the hundred-floored flying castle, surrounded by tiny-appearing towns at the ends of long narrow peninsulas leading back into the main castle floors. All the sun-touched golden layers visible at once, from here. From the arbitrary plane of force on which I'd materialized, sitting with my legs dangling over its end.

Everything in this place was utterly silent.

I turned my head, and saw that sitting to my right on the force-plane was Heathcliff, still in his armor. Or to call him by his proper name, Kayaba Akihito, creator of the Death Game. Heathcliff was staring at the floating castle-world of Aincrad, eyes gazing off into the distance.

Our duel had ended. I'd won. If Kayaba hadn't lied, the Death Game had been cleared.

The Death Game was over? I could… resume college? That impossible thought seemed light-years distant from the normal everyday work of fighting monsters.

I didn't relax. I couldn't. Leaving aside the adrenaline from when I'd just died, from when I'd seen my life bar go to zero and thought that I'd lost everything after all… I wasn't logged out. Maybe nobody else was logged out either. It wasn't over, not until my eyes opened for real, to see whatever hospital room was keeping my body alive. Not until I'd ripped the NerveGear off my head and gotten the microwave emitters away from my brainstem.

It should make sense for Heathcliff to let us go now. It should make sense on his terms, Kayaba Akihito's terms. If you were the sort of person who built a 100-floor fantasy castle, and then concealed microwave emitters in the NerveGear to fry anyone who died in the game or that the authorities tried to release… then you really believed in the game. On game terms, the Last Boss had been defeated. It was why I'd challenged Heathcliff in front of everyone after defeating the 75th floor boss, so that Kayaba's way of thinking would require that the game end there if I won.

But if you built concealed microwave emitters into your Nerve Gear, you were also someone without the tiniest respect for human life.

Sword Art Online had begun with 10,000 players. 6,000-some were still alive. Heathcliff could fry all of them with a word, if I'd been wrong about how he thought.

He could fry Kirito.

"Tell me, Asuna," Heathcliff said, the gentle sad tone he often used, "did you ever love me?"

"You knew I loved you," I replied. "You knew my heart beat faster for you, whenever I was with you. You knew that because you could monitor my heart rate." Not to mention who-knew-what other facts about my brain or my hormone levels.

Heathcliff shook his head, still not looking at me. "I could read the indicators. I didn't know how you felt inside."

I stared off at the golden 100-floor Castle Aincrad, trying to think of what reply would be safest for all the hostages still inside it. Heathcliff was too smart, we'd known each other too well, for me to just lie.

"Love…" I said finally. "Why do we try to reduce such a complex matter to a word, to love or not-love? You were always stronger than me in a fight. Even though my mind knew that was just the verdict of a game system, it still reached me on some level. You were the famous leader of the Knights of Blood, who led them to become the largest front-line guild in Aincrad. Leaving aside all the other ways we fit together, is it so improbable that I'd be attracted to that man?"

Heathcliff smiled wryly, still not looking back at me. "I was also the head developer for the entire Aincrad project, you know. I had to manage three hundred hardware engineers and two thousand programmers. Leading one small guild of seventy sworn comrades, who took their duties as seriously as if their very lives depended on it… for me, that was my fantasy." Heathcliff seemed to be looking down at his left arm, for some reason. "I made all of your avatars mirror your real bodies. I knew that would make it easier for you to return to the real world after Aincrad was cleared. And yet I still couldn't resist taking advantage myself." Heathcliff tapped his left arm at a spot not covered by the red-white metal of his armor, the tight black fabric beneath showing the outline of his powerful muscles. "I don't really look like this. I kept thinking it was only natural for you to be attracted to this fake appearance, especially since you thought it was real."

"You aren't a weak person," I understated. "How your body looks… well, I won't lie and say it doesn't matter, but it doesn't matter as much to a woman as a man. If the real world had been a place where I could fight by the side of Kayaba Akihito and fall in love with him, it might have happened there too. I think. I can't know any more than you can."

Heathcliff sighed softly. "When did you realize that I was Kayaba?"

"After you defeated Kirito-kun in that duel, in the guild arena." I looked back at the golden castle Aincrad, the floors we'd fought through and cleared together, one by one. "On the first day, when I was frantically organizing my thoughts and trying to figure out how to escape… even then I thought that anyone who made a fantasy world real, couldn't resist entering it himself. So from the first day, I stayed on the lookout for a suspicious person. Kirito had gained the unique skill Dual Wielding, he could take on floor bosses by himself." He looked so handsome that I thought maybe it wasn't his real appearance. He acted so mature I wondered about his real age. "The Black Swordsman was a prime candidate to be… to be you. It's why I first began making excuses to be around Kirito, to investigate him further. Then the two of you dueled, and you beat him."

What I didn't say aloud was that I'd realized then that no middle-aged man--as Heathcliff had made himself look, with greying hair despite his muscles--could realistically have been the strongest player in what was ultimately a VR game. The best gamer should have been someone like Kirito, with youthful reflexes and good neural plasticity to adapt to the VRMMO interface, whose grief-stricken state had led him to spend whole days soloing the front lines. Heathcliff and I had spent our time organizing a guild, with sensibly separated battles and downtime. Heathcliff and I should have been of similar strength as adventurers, with my own reflexes faster; and the Black Swordsman should have been able to stroll over both of us like sidewalks.

"I knew I shouldn't have won that duel," Heathcliff said. "I knew Heathcliff couldn't have won it under the game rules I'd set. I just… couldn't accept losing to Kirito, in front of you." Heathcliff turned his head to me, and he did look me in the eyes, then. "Did you go on loving me after you realized that I was Kayaba Akihito?"

I again stopped to think before I responded, still aware that one wrong word might get everyone killed. "I think…" I said. "I think there's a double standard. If the final boss were a beautiful villainess, and the male hero still loved her even as he fought her, that would be fine. If you're female, that same behavior makes you… not a slut, exactly, but it makes you something weak. A foolish girl, easily hypnotized. A sick woman who writes love letters to serial killers in prison. But yes, Heathcliff. Yes, Kayaba. Even then, to me you were…"

I didn't know how to phrase this part in a way that minimized the chance of everybody dying.

Everyone knows there's a kind of girl who adores Yagami Light, who thinks Hannibal Lecter is hot when he eats people, who wants to have Loki's babies.

The problem isn't just that you can't ethically allow yourself to do that. The problem isn't just that it'd be unsafe. It's unrealistic. You won't get the opportunity to virtuously turn down the opportunity.

Unless you happen to be trapped in a Death Game, and you realize your forbidden older lover is also the Last Boss, and that he can probably monitor your brain while you're in bed with him.

In that case you have a really good excuse to let yourself be attracted to Professor Moriarty while you figure out what to do next.

"You were still someone I loved," I finished. "But not someone I agreed with."

"I did peek at your neural indicators," Heathcliff said. "I knew you liked Kirito. You were attracted to him even before you figured me out. At first you didn't say anything to him, and he didn't say anything to you, because you were both too honorable for that. Then Kirito lost to me in that duel, and…" Heathcliff shook his head. "It really was stupid of me. I suspect Kirito also deduced who I was. His heart rate spiked, his brain centers showed fear, every time he saw me near you. But Kirito-kun didn't know you knew, and he couldn't say a word to you, not in Aincrad where Kayaba might see all things."

Heathcliff had a gentle look in his eyes. I was swallowing hard, myself. It wasn't something I'd expected to be true. It wasn't how I would've expected Heathcliff to react to that truth.

Heathcliff nodded, as though he knew my thoughts. "Do you intend to be with Kirito-kun, now that you're both free?"

My heart rate spiked, and I knew Heathcliff might know it. My brain went blank, and I couldn't think of anything to say, even if Kirito's life depended on it. I finally gave up and went with the truth, I blurted out in a small voice, "If he'll have me. Please don't hurt him."

"I never would." Heathcliff smiled, still gently. "He proved himself that final time, by trying to take the sword-blow meant for you."

I swallowed again. Kirito had… forgotten, I suppose, that Heathcliff and I were dueling, that Kirito wasn't part of the duel according to the game system, when Kirito tried to step in front of the sword blow that ended my life. The sword had passed through him like he wasn't even there, to kill me anyway; but for a horrible instant I'd thought Kirito-kun was about to die in my place, because I'd forgotten about the duel rules too.

And then, as I'd thought I was dying… some part of me had felt the appropriateness. That it was part of the dark fantasy that Hannibal Lecter eats you too, in the end. I hadn't known that about myself.

"It's lucky for you," Heathcliff went on, "that your will was strong enough to overcome the rules of the game system itself, so you could miraculously come back to life and beat me."

I slugged Heathcliff on the arm before I realized what I was doing. "Idiot," I said without heat. "The true reality underneath all of this is still reality, where miracles don't exist. Players would have come back from death all the time, if they could do that just by really really wanting to. You broke the system rules on purpose."

Heathcliff chuckled. "Were you gambling that I couldn't bear to kill you? Was that why you didn't let Kirito-kun fight in your stead, like he was screaming for you to let him do?"

I wanted to look down at my hands, but I didn't. "Yes," I lied. I had thought of the possibility that Heathcliff would go easy on me. I was certainly going to claim to Kirito-kun that was why I hadn't let him fight.

"The final challenge wasn't to defeat me using the game system. That would have been pointless. I could have made myself strong enough to defeat anyone, or weak enough to be defeated, or I could have made the fight balanced enough to rest on the game system's random numbers; but all of those options would have been equally meaningless. Instead, the rule was this: if the hero was willing to fight me to their death, they would win. That was the test of character I set for Aincrad's last battle. I didn't make an exception for you."

Again I had trouble finding words. "How… Kayaba, of you."

"Tell me, Asuna. Why do you suppose I did all this, trapped real people inside my game?"

Because you built your perfect fantasy world and became obsessed with making it real. I said instead what I thought he might want to hear. "Is this where you tell me that these were the most exciting times I'll ever have? That reality might seem dull by comparison to Aincrad, where swords flashed and my life was on the line? I knew that already, Kayaba Akihito."

"And you still ended it early?" Now Heathcliff was smiling. "After just the seventy-fifth floor?"

"People were dying," I answered. "Other people's real lives were passing them by while they were trapped. It might not have mattered to you, Kayaba. But you knew it would matter to us. It's why we went on the front lines, why anyone joined your guild. You have no right to complain."

"Indeed," Heathcliff said. "Still, my own motivation wasn't just the obvious one."

Heathcliff gestured downward, as we were suddenly no longer watching the floating castle Aincrad, but instead floating high above a populated city, our legs dangling from the same plane of force as before. Tokyo, we were above Tokyo; the National Diet Building was directly below us.

People bustled frantically in the streets below, their tiny hurried motions visible even from this height.

"This dull world's mundanity… it isn't just an aesthetic problem," Heathcliff said. "It has serious consequences." Heathcliff pointed down at the National Diet Building. "It used to be that ministers were drawn from those who'd been soldiers or generals. Today, the politicians are all people like me. Aping strength, putting up a mockery of integrity. Pretending to be… what you are. I thought people might prefer the real thing, the heroes who fought through a world out of the impossible, putting their lives on the line to protect the innocents behind them. Especially the leaders like Yuuki Asuna, who'd proven their ability to organize as well as fight. You might lead Japan to better days. That was the excuse that I invented for myself, when I couldn't resist my fascination with the thought of giving Aincrad real inhabitants." The Tokyo districts faded, and the golden castle-world materialized before us once more.

Heathcliff was smiling fondly at me. "I know you're furious at me right now, Asuna, so you might as well go ahead and say it to my face. I swear that it won't put the people of Aincrad in danger, and besides, I can already guess what you're thinking."

"You," I was having trouble speaking, remembering Klein's last words, the look of horror on Caitlin's face as the inescapable trap slowly ground down her hit points, what Kirito had told me about Sachi's death and what that had done to him. Somehow my mind had managed to hold off on the full realization, until I'd heard Heathcliff confirm that he was responsible. Heard his mad justification. Watched him take pride in it to my face. "There was a flaw in your reasoning, Kayaba. You killed the heroes. The most courageous, the most selfless of us, the best people of the ones you trapped. They were first to sacrifice themselves to save the rest of us, and they died."

Heathcliff began laughing then.

I knew my heart rate was spiking further, that my brain monitors might be registering real hatred now. I still couldn't control myself, couldn't change how I felt.

Heathcliff stopped laughing, and said, "What makes you think they're dead?"

My mind went blank.

"What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You've had no contact with the outside world for two years. How do you know that your friends died in real life, when you saw them burst into triangles?"

"Y-you, you said--" I'd understood immediately, it wasn't like nobody had ever suggested the possibility, but the thought was still struggling to manifest itself in my brain, along with a sense of, of, I couldn't even describe to myself how I felt.

"Don't think too kindly of me, Asuna. I did kill one hundred and seven innocent people when somebody tried to remove their NerveGears early on, including fourteen children. Those deaths were necessary, for my purpose. The authorities would have freed you otherwise. But I had no logical reason to kill anyone else. I needed you to believe in my death threat, to keep you playing my game properly, but I didn't need to follow through. Indeed, it would have been counterproductive to follow through. As it stood, the authorities knew that if they let the game alone, you'd all wake up eventually; while if they tried harder to free you, I might just murder you all. If I'd been killing you one by one, the authorities would have tried much harder to release you. So those selfless heroes who sacrificed their lives to protect others… woke up to true daylight, rewarded with their freedom. Those who stayed behind and let others protect them… had to stay trapped for years. How can you possibly think I'd set it up any other way?" Heathcliff reached over and mussed my hair, his usual affectionate gesture, while I was still utterly utterly speechless. "Asuna-chan, you must learn to be less trusting of what people like me say in words, and think about our incentives instead. Only then can you become, in the outside world, the brilliant leader that the world has seen Yuuki Asuna-sama can be."

"S-seen," I said.

"It's a fact of modern life that people are respected according to how many other people know their names, not according to their virtue. An actor who's played a fake hero in movies is a more credible political candidate than somebody who has merely risked their life in reality. For that reason, your lives in Aincrad were broadcast on the Internet. After I showed I could always release the video by one channel or another, the authorities gave up and let the royalties be booked in your names. The whole world has witnessed your valor, your honesty, your loyalty, your administrative skills, and, well, some other skills as well."

The system was giving me the feedback that indicated it had detected a blushing impulse and was making the blush visible on my cheeks. The feedback indicated that my cheeks were hot enough to light candles. "Did you, you didn't, surely you wouldn't have--"

"The recordings also showed us in bed together, though the usual channels didn't broadcast that part and people had to go to black websites to find it. The audience also knew from the start that Heathcliff was the villain. Right now there's one hundred and sixty million of those squalid voyeurs watching us exchange our final words." The System now also showed Heathcliff's cheeks with a light blush, but his voice was steady. "The fundamental problem of politics is that nobody can know what goes on behind closed doors. I didn't want people to wonder whether their beloved Asuna-sama showed a different face in her bedroom, if they couldn't see what she was doing with the story's villain."

"I can't believe you," I said in a tiny high voice.

Heathcliff went on talking. "Every moment of every life in Aincrad was shown from beginning to end, twenty-four hours a day. All the lies, all the honesty, all the little conspiracies, what people whisper in gossip that differs from what they say to each other's faces, what goes on in a normal human bedroom instead of pornography. For the first time in this world's history, I did what authors have always pretended to do, and never done. I held up a mirror to show humanity its true face, its true true face, both the bad parts and the good. The Laughing Coffin guild, who thought they were getting away with murder, are waking to a world that knows exactly what they tried to do. The merchants who were scrupulously honest, who never misled or cheated a customer despite the temptations I built into the game, are waking to a world that knows they can be trusted with money. I don't think it would be a better world if every human being was watched all the time. But doing that to ten thousand unknowing victims, in a crucible where interesting things were happening to them… it gave the world a few souls that everyone saw could be trusted. Trusted with the world. That was not my real reason, but it was my excuse, for everything I did."

They'd seen, they'd seen, in the bedroom, me and Heathcliff, the whole world had watched, when I, with my older boyfriend, or even by myself, had--

The golden castle Aincrad began crumbling soundlessly, shattering apart from the top floors down, great chunks breaking off and falling into the void.

A sudden horror bypassed my soul-crushing sense of mortification.

"Kayaba--" My voice was blocked. "What happens to you?"

"Exactly what you're thinking. I'll never experience anything as interesting as this again, and the villain should pay for his crimes at the story's end."

"I," my voice hitched, "Heathcliff, please don't." I knew even then that there was nothing I could say. I'd thought I had seen half my friends die, and that part of me already knew how to deal with the grief that was coming.

The 22nd level of Aincrad was disintegrating, and in it, the Forest House where Heathcliff and I had lived, with all our items and everything we'd built within the game. Falling away, dissolving into the endless golden mists below. Part of my mind was screaming that I'd destroyed our home.

"The police tracked down my body, Asuna-chan, and found the person I was forcing to take care of me. Five officers are standing by my bed now. The only reason they couldn't interfere earlier was fear of what would happen to all of you. As soon as my hostages are freed, the police will finish the arrest they made four months ago." Sitting beside me now was a thinner man in a labcoat, his greying hair less well-groomed, with the same sad eyes Heathcliff had worn from the start. "There's only one reason I'd have even considered forcing myself to live through that. But you never were the kind of woman that writes love letters to murderers in prison."

The color in the world was dissolving, leaving behind animated sketches, black lines on white.

"Goodbye, Asuna. Even if it's foolish to reduce complicated matters down to one word, I think I loved you too."

Kayaba, I--

I reached for him, but before my hand could touch him--

My eyes opened.


End file.
